Game Development Screen Shot of the Day – Manipulating bits of landscape.

— This is the old ‘client’s look. This is one or two generations back. What you’re looking at is a piece of an area being ‘created’, stretched, resized, and soon it will be shaped, texturized, maybe painted, and moved into place. That bit of landscape that is hovering in dark space there might end up being an off-shore mountain that you can’t get to from here- Or it might be flipped upside down and manipulted to become the ceiling, the inside of a cave – what you’d see if you look up inside the cave. If anybody playing your game can see the coutside of the cave, as in, a mountain or hill- you have to ‘create’ another piece of landscape, size it, texturize it, shape it and very carefully move it so it is right-side-up on top of the upside down cave interior – And you better fly all around your mountain or hill and go inside your cave and make sure everything did fit together right. These bits are only visible from one side. Your character may be able to walk through a wall it can’t see until it turns around and then it wouldn’t be able to get back. As a developer you can ‘turn off collisions’ and walk through walls and fall into a black void, or a white void, or a grey void, or a pink void- or all kinds of different coloured nothingness, that never looks like anywhere you’d want to stay. And I’ve actually lost a couple builder characters that way. You can now restart them in a safe zone and move them back to the area you fell through – making sure collisions are back ‘on’, or you’re in ‘flying’ mode so you can move up and down and around and in and out and then rise above a spot you’d like your builder character to fly down to and land. But sometimes weird things happen, like part of the character might be invisible, or gone. This can be traumatic. ~~~ TaleRocker